How to Sell As A Multi-Passionate #217

If you’re feeling like you’re never going to be successful no matter how hard you try, then this episode is for you!

Table of Contents

I’m a multi-passionate person, which means I have multiple interests and passions that I want to include in my business. I know that some people think that being well-rounded is a flaw or a failure, but I see it as a strength. I’m able to bring together my various skills and create something truly unique.

I didn’t always know that being multi-passionate was a strength. In fact, I used to think that I had to choose one thing and stick with it. But after hearing about other multi-passionate people who were successful in business, I realized that I could use my multiple interests to my advantage. Now, I help my clients by offering a variety of services that are all connected.

In this episode, you will learn the following:

What are the benefits of being a multi-passionate person in business?
How can you tie your various skills together to create a more well-rounded offering?
How can you use your different passions for marketing your business on various platforms?

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Highlights in this episode:

[00:01:22] – Being well-rounded is a strength for most service providers and coaches.

[00:02:37] – What is a multi-passionate or multipotentialite?

[00:03:42] – The multi-passionate title has grown so rapidly these last few years, entrepreneurs started doing their thing because they don’t want to live in somebody else’s box.

[00:05:13] – After choosing what lights you up, it’s time to tie it into your core values.

[00:07:57] – Steve Jobs, Richard Branson and Marie Forleo are examples of multi-passionate people making business work.

[00:12:00] – There are three action steps you can take to improve your business or service.

Blog Post

If you, like me, have found yourself in a few different careers throughout your life, you may feel this is a flaw. You may feel like a failure. You may even feel like you’re never truly an expert in anything.

I want to offer another perspective: you’re well-rounded.

For most service providers and coaches, this is a strength. Just today, before writing this article, I helped a single client with content deliverables that included:

Adding a new measurable metric to her content ROI dashboard (in this case, measuring the engagement + viewership of her LinkedIn lives)
Create graphic quotes pulled from a previous live transcript
Critiqued the resulting blog post created by her VA from that transcript.
Wrote CTAs for numerous blog posts and lives.

If you’re counting, that’s three distinct “jobs,” as the world calls it: copywriting, analytics + data measurement, and graphic design.

This is a regular occurrence for me.

Does that make me a failure? Hardly! It makes me a useful resource as a marketer.

What Is A Multi-Passionate?

Before we dive into how to sell as a multi-passionate, let’s define what a multi-passionate is:

Emilie Wapnick’s TED talk called them Multipotentiliates. She says they’re people “who have a range of interests and jobs over one lifetime.”

Kinga Mnich said, “Multi-talented, multi-potentiality, scanner, polymath, renaissance person, and generalist are related terms.” I love that term, renaissance person. If you think back to Da Vinci, he’s known as both an artist and inventor, and it’s a great visual of the different interests a person can reasonably have.

“You were not meant to do one thing” is the theme running through it.

In general, online running around the interwebs, I often see people say they’re hemmed in by niching down. I believe this is why the multi-passionate title grew rapidly these last few years.

How To Pull Your Various Skills Together

Here, I’ll pull an excerpt from an older podcast episode that I came across recently:

“And this right here, for the record, if you’re multi-passionate, is really important. I’ve met so many multi-passionate people who think, well, I have to just choose one because everyone’s telling me to niche. Actually, you can choose one skill, you can choose one way of working with your clients, and quite possibly one very specific kind of client who needs that variety and skill sets. That is how you build a business built on many passions and many skills and theoretically disparate elements and bring it all together in a way that really makes sense. So that your personality, your core values, and your experience come together and flesh out, build out that really complete brand, that personal brand you’re building online to sell your products and your services and whatever it is that you are offering.”

What lights you up?

That was a lot of information in a short clip. The key here is what lights you up?

I spent over a decade professionally photographing weddings and designing wedding albums. (Yes, even then, I ran two businesses!) My skills were visual, but I realized quickly that other photographers weren’t very good at layout design, and I offered it to them as a service. As a bonus, it was often work done in the wedding off-season, so I had a better cash flow setup throughout the year.

When it was time for me to move on from photography, I first moved into branding photography as it was an easier transition. I quickly realized, brand photos were simply one element of content planning. Many of my clients loved their photos but didn’t know what to do with them and I offered them some light social media training.

Eight years later, here we are.

Tie it into your core values

It may seem odd that I went from wedding photography to analytics and metrics on top of content planning, but it brings all my loves together.

I want everything in my life to have meaning.

If I’m going to put two hours into a meal, you better believe there’s a good reason and not simply a whim behind it.
If I’m going to devote several hours a week to homeschooling my eleven-year-old, there’s a reason beyond “having a flexible schedule” that makes it happen.
If I name my chickens, I promise you there’s a deep meaning behind each.

Content is the same. If I’m going to spend hours creating it… it better be working!

My love for analytics and measurement came out of my search for easier ways to ensure all the time I invested in creating it was time well spent.

You know–”the whole money is a renewable resource but time isn’t” thing? It’s something I believe deeply.

Add in your personality

I’m a great consultant, so I’ve designed my services around consulting. As a bonus, the disparate skills I’ve mentioned are great in a setup kind of service package. Both the Content ROI Dashboard as a standalone product (in which the sales page actually says, “just the facts, ma’am”) and my full DFY content planning service, Visibility Accelerator, are services as a product, as a result.

Examples Of Multi-Passionates Making Business Work

Need more examples beyond my business?

Let’s look at Steve Jobs and Richard Branson. Let’s look at Oprah.

Steve Jobs, known best as the co-founder of Apple, balanced his love for technology with the simple beauty of aesthetic minimalism. He didn’t just create a computer. He created a computer first, then later one that could fit into our hands. After recently listening to Adam Grant’s Think Again showcase on the founder of the Blackberry device, and hearing the stark contrast between him and Jobs, I see even more the renaissance power of Steve Jobs.

Looking for less lofty businesspeople? Marie Forleo has brought this term to the forefront recently, and many of her followers have opted into the term.

Themultipassionate.com is run by a woman named Hannah. Her website lists VA and Notion services and while I don’t know her personally, I can easily see how she started her digital nomad life as a VA, quickly realized the power of Notion to organize her and her clients’ various situations, and started offering it as a service out of both need and her interests.

Bringing Your Passions Together In Content

Content marketing has a unique offer for multi-passionates. To put it bluntly, we don’t have to exist on one plane and therefore our marketing doesn’t either.

I glommed onto Instagram early as a visual person. I’ll admit: it’s probably hard to be a writer on that platform at the moment if you don’t have visuals from a team of help.

But after attending CEX last spring and hearing about Miss Excel killing it on TikTok, I can’t help but think there’s a way to market anything on any platform. Excel is, quite possibly, one of the drier topics I can imagine in this moment, and it’s working on TikTok, the most visual and energetic of platforms. For a platform known for short attention spans, this is good news for us all.

Action steps you can take now:

If your business/services feel like they’re missing something, how can you add that in? Use my business, and the others listed in the examples section, as inspiration.
What auxiliary pieces are your services missing right now? For example, I include graphic templates as a part of my full DFY content service. It’s a skill I have that I can easily include, but you can outsource these extras for your clients if it’s not in your skillset right now.
How can you use your various skills to market, even if they’re not included in your services?